Edward Aubyn - The Patrick Melrose Novels - Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk

‘The thing about things is that they just keep getting lost,’ said Patrick. ‘The Emperor lost his throne before Uncle Bill lost his garden furniture.’

‘Well, at least Uncle Bill’s children got to sell Fairley,’ Nancy flared up. ‘They didn’t have it stolen.’

‘Listen, I’m the first to sympathize. After what Eleanor did, we’re the most financially withered branch of the family,’ said Patrick. ‘How long were you separated from your mother?’ he asked, as if to introduce a lighter note.

‘Four years.’

‘Four years!’

‘Well, we went to America two years before the war started. Mummy stayed in Europe trying to get the really good things out of France and England and Italy, and she only made it to America two years after the Germans invaded. She and Jean escaped via Portugal and when they arrived I remember that her shoe trunk had fallen overboard from the fishing boat they hired to get them across to New York. I thought that if you could get away from the Germans and only lose a trunk with nothing in it but shoes, you weren’t having such a bad war.’

‘But how did you feel about not seeing her all that time?’

‘Well, you know, I had the oddest conversation with Eleanor a couple of years before she had her stroke. She told me that when Mummy and Jean arrived at Fairley, she rowed out to the middle of the lake and refused to talk to them because she was so angry that Mummy had abandoned us for four years. I was shocked because I couldn’t remember anything about it. I mean, that would have been a big deal in our young lives. But all I remember is Mummy’s shoes getting lost.’

‘I guess everybody remembers what’s important to them,’ said Patrick.

‘She told me that she hated Mummy,’ said Nancy. ‘I mean, I didn’t know that was genetically possible.’

‘Her genes probably just stood by horrified,’ said Patrick. ‘The story Eleanor always told me was that she hated your mother for sacking the two people she loved and depended on: her father and her nanny.’

‘I tied myself to the car when Nanny was being driven away,’ said Nancy competitively.

‘Well, there you have it – didn’t you feel a little gene-defying twinge…’

‘No! I blamed Jean. He was the one who persuaded Mummy that we were too old to have a nanny.’

‘And your father?’

‘Well, Mummy said that she just couldn’t afford to keep him any more. Every week he would drive her crazy with some new extravagance. In the run-up to Ascot, for instance, he didn’t just buy a racehorse, he bought a stable of racehorses. Do you know what I’m saying?’

‘Those were the days,’ said Patrick. ‘I’d love to be in a position to be irritated by Mary buying a couple of dozen racehorses, rather than getting in a blind panic when Thomas needs a new pair of shoes.’

‘You’re exaggerating.’

‘It’s the only extravagance I can still afford.’

The telephone rang, drawing Nancy into a study next to her library, and leaving Patrick on the soft sofa dented by the weight of the red leather album, with 1940 stamped in gold on its spine.

The image of Eleanor rowing out to the middle of the lake and refusing to talk to anyone fused in Patrick’s imagination with her present condition, bedridden and cut off from the rest of the world.

The day after she had settled into her thickly carpeted, overheated, nursing tomb in Kensington, Patrick was rung by the director.

‘Your mother would like to see you straight away. She thinks she’s going to die today.’

‘Is there any reason to believe she’s right?’

‘There’s no medical reason as such, but she is very insistent.’

Patrick hauled himself out of his chambers and went over to see Eleanor. He found her crying from the unspeakable frustration of having something so important to say. After half an hour, she finally gave birth to, ‘Die today,’ delivered with all the stunned wonder of recent motherhood. After that, hardly a day passed without a death promise emerging from half an hour’s gibbering, weeping struggle.

When Patrick complained to Kathleen, the perky Irish nurse in charge of Eleanor’s floor, she clasped his forearm and hooted, ‘She’ll probably outlive us all. Take Dr MacDougal on the next floor. When he was seventy, he married a lady half his age – she was a lovely lady, so friendly. Well, the next year, it was quite tragic really, he got the Alzheimer’s and moved in here. She was ever so devoted, came to see him every day. Anyway, if she didn’t get breast cancer the following year. She was dead three years after marrying him, and he’s still upstairs, going strong. ’

After a final hoot of laughter, she left him standing alone in the airless corridor next to the locked dispensary.

What depressed him even more than the inaccuracy of Eleanor’s predictions was the doggedness of her self-deception and her spiritual vanity. The idea that she had any special insight into the exact time of her death was typical of the daydreams that ruled her life. It was only in June, after she had fallen over and broken her hip, that she began to take a more realistic attitude about the degree of control she could have over her death.

Patrick went to visit her in the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital after her fall.

Eleanor had been given morphine for breakfast, but her restlessness was unsubdued. The desperate need to get out of bed, which had produced several falls, bruising her right temple purple-black, leaving her nose swollen and red, staining her right eyelid yellow and eventually fracturing her hip, made her, even now, reach for the bar on the side of her Evans Nesbit Jubilee bed and try to pull herself up with those flabby white arms bruised by fresh puncture marks Patrick could not help envying. A few clear phrases reared up like Pacific islands from a mumbling moaning ocean of meaningless syllables.

‘I have a rendezvous,’ she said, making a renewed surge towards the end of the bed.

‘I’m sure whoever you have to meet will come here,’ said Patrick, ‘knowing that you can’t move.’

‘Yes,’ she said, collapsing back on the bloodstained pillows for a moment, but lurching forwards again and wailing, ‘I have a rendezvous.’

She was not strong enough to stay up for long, and soon resumed a slow writhing motion on the bed, and the long haul through another stretch of murmurous, urgent nonsense. And then ‘No longer’ appeared, not attached to anything else. She ran her hands down her face in exasperation, looking as if she wanted to cry but was being let down by her body in that respect as well.

At last she managed it.

‘I want you to kill me,’ she said, gripping his hand surprisingly hard.

‘I’d love to help,’ said Patrick, ‘but unfortunately it’s against the law.’

‘No longer,’ shouted Eleanor.

‘We’re doing all we can,’ he said vaguely.

Looking for solace in practicality, Patrick tried to give his mother a sip of pineapple juice from the plastic glass on her bedside table. He eased his hand under the top pillow and lifted her head, tipping the juice gently towards her peeling lips. He felt himself being transformed by the tenderness of the act. He had never treated anyone so carefully except his own children. The flow of generations was reversed and he found himself holding his useless, treacherous, confused mother with exquisite anxiety. How to lift her head, how to make sure she didn’t choke. He watched her roll the sip of juice around her mouth, an alarmed and disconnected look on her face, and he willed her to succeed while she tried to remind her throat how to swallow.

Poor Eleanor, poor little Eleanor, she wasn’t well at all, she needed help, she needed protection. There was no obstacle, no interruption to his desire to help her. He was amazed to see his argumentative, disappointed mind overwhelmed by a physical act. He leant over further and kissed her on the forehead.